Read Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived for Free Online

hellhole for the criminally insane. Its concrete walls were surrounded by razor wire, its every window blocked by steel bars. The clangor of bars and insanity bouncing off the cold walls was deafening. Even on the brightest days, Vroom was gloomy.
    Unruh, or Patient No. 47,077, was locked in cell eleven. Paint flaked from the Spartan cubicle’s walls, which defined Unruh’s new world: a steel cot with a thin, soiled mattress, a toilet, a sink, and a footlocker for whatever possessions Unruh might prize enough to keep in an asylum.
    His mother visited faithfully every three weeks, but Unruh grew steadily more insane. He believed the television was spying on his thoughts. For decades, his days were spent mostly listening to the voices in his head, walking in endless circles in a small, fenced-in grassy area outside, and discussing the Oedipus complex, the unwelcome thoughts in his brain, and all the other inmates who were talking about him behind his back and plotting to hurt him. Dutifully, Unruh voted in every election, although his ballots were routinely thrown out until 2009, when New Jersey banned its insane citizens from voting.
    At first, he read many books, especially those about science and astronomy, but he began to suspect that all books were contaminated, so he refused to touch them.
    In 1954, twenty-three insane criminals rioted for two hours in the Vroom Building’s dining hall, taking a guard prisoner and setting fire to the furniture. Howard Unruh simply sat and watched.
    With the advent of antipsychotic drugs such as Thorazine, Unruh’s delusions and hallucinations were tamed. Unruh grew exceedingly competent by legal standards. In articulate, handwritten letters in 1965, he asked a judge to dismiss the thirteen murder indictments against him—still standing after fourteen years—and transfer him to a safer, more comfortable Veterans Administration hospital. The request was denied.
    Then in 1979, the fifty-eight-year-old Unruh asked to be transferred to a minimum-security state psychiatric hospital, closer to his sickly, eighty-two-year-old mother, but citizens in that town rose up in protest. Unruh was, after all, still a confessed mass murderer.
    A sympathetic public defender, James Klein, came to Unruh’s rescue. The mad killer’s only chance to escape the dark, medieval Vroom Building was to have all the murder indictments dismissed, effectively making him (in the law’s eyes) just another mental patient entitled to a life outside what was, in effect, a maximum-security prison.
    â€œI think if we don’t transfer him he’ll die shortly,” the New Jersey State Hospital’s administrator said behind closed doors in 1979. “If we don’t transfer him before his mother expires then he will go downhill very rapidly. I think the environment, coupled with the fact that there’s a great distance between him and his mother, exacerbates this slow physical deterioration.”
    So, in 1980, a state judge ruled that Unruh’s constitutional right to a speedy trial had been violated and threw out the murder indictments. The Camden County prosecutor’s office immediately appealed, setting up a hearing that would determine whether Unruh was well enough to live in a less restrictive, more humane environment.
    With the rap of a gavel, Charles Cohen’s carefully buried secrets were about to be exhumed, thirty-one years after he had laid them to rest.
    Charles could not stand by silently and let his parents’ killer win a moment’s comfort without a fight. It frightened him that the murder charges had been dropped, opening the door to increasing freedom for a madman …maybe even to eventually letting him go free.
    It was a waking nightmare, and every horrific memory came flooding back. A lifetime of grief unreeled in living color.
    His only hope was to speak out, to let loose the darkness inside him—not to hide in a closet but to fight